Posts Tagged ‘satire’

Each time I finish a play, especially a full length one, I become more or less catatonic. I can’t bear even the thought of writing anything else; a state that lasts for anywhere from two to four months.

Then, one day, I realize that I’m seeing things, and starting to get annoyed. Not that I’m not annoyed a good deal of the time every day. It’s just that now, I find I’m getting annoyed and wanting to tell people about it. And that’s when I know I’m ready to write again.

I finished the script of “Getting Betta” in mid February. Fortunately, in this case my catatonia (sounds like a province in northern Spain, doesn’t it?) corresponded with 2 productions of Shakespeare Incorporated, one of Postville, and a gig of Senior Moments. So at least I appeared to have an excuse for not being productive.

But this past weekend I went to see 3 plays. One of them had gotten a great review in a local newspaper, and another had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Frankly, the only one I thought was a particularly good script was the third one, which was presented by a group of recent CU grads I’d taken classes with over the past several years.

But the thing that got me going was the fact that all 3 plays used the same dramatic device — the characters taking turns stepping out of the action of the play and addressing the audience. I think that device was wonderful for the Stage Manager in Our Town, but that was 80 years ago. Has it become the hallmark for every worthy contemporary piece of drama?

While I was taking a walk this morning, I started thinking about that and all the other things that annoy me about the playwriting business. And Whammo!, a play emerged. (Actually, it happens in the other direction first, so I guess it “inmerged”.) The working title for the play is “Catharsis,” and it’s about overuse of hackneyed dramatic devices, people who tell you how to rewrite your plays, writing to formulae for commercial success, not being recognized for your true genius, …. You get the idea.

“Catharsis” is going to be no more than 10 pages, so it should be finished in a couple of days.

A couple of weeks ago I crossed an important barrier. Some time during my working career – I think it was about 1980 — I realized that I was getting a sick feeling in my stomach every time the phone would ring or my boss would call me into his office. It was almost always bad news. I’d done something wrong, or somebody else had done something wrong, or something bad had happened without anyone in particular being at fault. But it usually meant that I’d have to work through the night and, more often than not, it signified that whatever I was involved with was in the process of going down the tubes.

Hope may spring eternal in the human breast, but by the time I retired, it no longer did in mine. Which was just as well, because when I started writing, the trend continued. Nobody was interested in my work, and most letters, emails and phone calls were to inform me that another one of my plays had been rejected.

Not that this was all bad. Viewing the world through mud-colored glasses is a good thing for a playwright. Being a curmudgeon makes for drama, and drama makes for – well – drama.

But then one morning about two weeks ago, the phone rang and I realized as I went to pick it up that I was saying to myself, “Maybe it’s someone who wants to produce Senior Moments. And it was! Good things had started happening often enough that, without realizing it, I’d crossed over from the Vale of Pessimism to the Hills of Positivity. That was a good thing, right?

Not quite. Crusty Old Fart-hood dies hard. My first reaction was to bemoan the loss of one of the driving forces of my artistic inspiration. If I’m not constantly pissed off at the world and everything in it, how am I going to come up with ideas for plays in which pissed off people overcome their problems.

Well, I needn’t have worried. I’m in London at the moment for the opening of rehearsals for a production of Shakespeare Incorporated. As soon as the plane from Denver took off, the woman in front of me put her seat back in my lap and stayed there for the next 9 hours. Sweet! At Heathrow, we landed at the brand new Terminal 5. Rather than being an improvement on the abysmal Terminals 1 – 4, it’s even worse. Delightful! I got onto the Tube to go downtown; we went 5 stations and the train stopped. After a few minutes, the driver came on and announced that a train following us was delayed, so in order not to have too much of a gap between trains, they were going to have all trains on the line sit in their stations until the faulty train was running again. Wonderful!

And so it has gone for the past 3 days. The weather is typical London grotty. The air bed I was sleeping on in my director’s flat has popped half its seams, so the bed lies at a 30 degree angle, and so did I all night. The 5 year old son of the couple I stayed with last night decided that the world would be better if he head-butted me repeatedly in the groin. Could life possibly get any better?

So I needn’t have worried about losing my inspiration for a world in which things are constantly annoying and going wrong. I’m so relieved!

According to Hollywood folklore, the words in the title of this post are what a studio functionary is supposed to have written about Fred Astaire’s screen test for RKO Pictures in the early 1930s.

That quotation comes more and more to mind as Shakespeare Incorporated and several of my other plays begin having some success. Each of these plays was rejected — occasionally quite rudely — by quite a number of the theaters and contests to which I submitted them. I’m also reminded of another Hollywood executive who had an option on the screenplay for ET and sold it to Steven Spielberg. And of the guy from Decca Records who turned down the Beatles.

OK, so I may not be in the Beatles’ class in terms of recognition any time soon, and Shakespeare Incorporated may never rival ET for commercial success. But just in case, I’ve decided to follow the lead of the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado, and I’m compiling a little list (they’d none of them be missed). If Shakespeare Incorporated ever wins a Tony or a Pulitzer, I’ll be ready to look up each and every person who rejected the play and make them eat their words. Preferably, I’ll force them to ingest the rejection letters they sent me. (If they ignored me and didn’t even have the decency to send a rejection letter, I’ve saved up some old scripts that should be particularly appetizing.)

Yes, I do take all this very personally. But hey, I’m a crusty old fart; that’s my job.

I know it’s not the Boulder way. Instead of being bitter and twisted and savoring thoughts of revenge, I should be grateful for whatever success I achieve, and we should all hold hands and hum and frolic semi-naked in the snow of a Colorado January. Screw that! You must be mistaking me with someone else.

Those of you in Boulder, don’t expect to see me any time soon. No doubt when this post becomes public, they’ll rescind my visa to the People’s Republic. Again.

Last night we had the 6th of 8 performances of Taste of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. (I’m in a Renaissance quintet that we formed to sing before and during the play.)

Merchant of Venice has sometimes been tough to swallow. It’s a great play, but it’s deeply anti-Semitic. While it’s probable that Shakespeare didn’t have anything personal against Jews — they were expelled from England in 1290 and weren’t officially allowed back in until 1655 — anti-Semitism remained widespread in Britain. As well read as Shakespeare was, he would have been exposed to it in literature and come to regard it as accepted wisdom. The play reflects that fact.

Nonetheless, we’ve gotten through 6 performances of Merchant of Venice so far without any picketing. It is Shakespeare, after all, so people make allowances.

When I started talking about writing a play about the events in Postville, my family and friends pleaded with me not to.

“There’s no way you’re going to be able to write this play without it being anti-Semitic,” they told me.

“Sure there is,” I responded, although I have to admit that at the time I wasn’t quite convinced. Unless the play was going to be too sticky-sweet to say anything, it was going to have to tread through a host of “ism” minefields — anti-Semitism, anti-immigrantism, anti-Midwest farmerism, …

I’m convinced that I’ve achieved the objective of writing a play that deals sensitively and appropriately with a number of difficult issues. But each time there’s a public reading — this past week were the second and third — I’m concerned that I’m going to get the crap kicked out of me by people who hear individual sentences but miss the point.

There was only one instance of it this week. And that was a woman who beat me up for not following up in the play on the otherwise un-referred-to occupants of a bus that gets clobbered by a train. Anti-innocent-bystanderism? (Come on, Lady, even Tolstoy when he was writing War and Peace had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out!)

I’m hugely relieved, but I’ll continue to worry about people who are so burned by their hot buttons that they can’t or won’t see things in context.

So here’s my plea. Just treat me with the same consideration you’d give Shakespeare. That wouldn’t be so hard, would it?

Last Monday I flew to Omaha and then rented a car and drove to Des Moines for a public reading of “Postville” at StageWest. (“Postville” is my play about the group of Hasidic Jews who bought a defunct meatpacking plant in a struggling, northeast Iowa town and reopened it as a kosher facility. Click here for the synopsis.) There was a rehearsal on Monday night and then the reading was Tuesday night. There were over 100 people at the reading, which is about three times the turnout that they normally get for this kind of thing. Given the media attention the play has gotten, that wasn’t surprising.

The reading went better than I had hoped for — people laughed at the right times, they oohed and aahed at the right times, they even wiped their eyes and sniffled at the right times. Wait! Maybe that was me wiping and sniffling. But the laughing and oohing and aahing is the gospel truth.

Everybody seemed engrossed in the play from the first page through the end, an hour and forty intermission-free minutes later. No shuffling in seats, no checking of watches or talking among themselves, and only two people running out to the rest room. And when it was over, there was sustained, enthusiastic applause. I’ve been around theater enough to know the difference between polite, “Let’s get out of here, but not embarrass the cast” applause, and “This was really pretty good” applause. This was the latter.

Next there was a 5 minute potty break. Most of the audience then left, but about 30 people returned for a talk-back session.

The events in Postville (see the article on the play in the Iowa Independentor the Des Moines Register for some of the background) have been in the news in Iowa on a daily basis for the past year, and it has all been incredibly traumatic and emotional for the people of Iowa. Was the owner of the plant guilty of immigration and human-rights violations? Or was the whole thing being blown out of proportion by the media because he is a member of a Jewish religious sect? Did the immigration agents abuse the rights of the illegal immigrants? There are dozens of issues here.

Given the level of attention and emotion, I knew that many Iowans were going to have very strong prejudices about what should be the focus of the play, what should be included and excluded, and even whether it should have been written at all. So I was expecting to get beaten up by at least some of the people who remained for the talk-back session. And I was.

Three groups emerged from those who stayed. Five or six people were what I’ll call activists. They came with an axe to grind, and they were going to grind it. How dare I write a fictional play (the play has been marketed as a fictional account, inspired by the events in Postville) and use the name of the town? I should either write a documentary, 100% factual, or else I should move the setting of the play somewhere else, change the Hasidim to some other group (Amish?), and make it otherwise unrecognizable. Some people insisted I should make it more clear that the owner of the plant was criminally guilty. Others insisted that I should make him completely innocent.

You get the idea. Nobody likes to talk more or louder than a social activist with an audience. These 5 or 6 people each had vastly differing opinions, each insisted that I HAD TO change the play as he or her wanted it changed. Between them they monopolized most of the conversation.

The second group was made up of three older college playwriting professors. Someone who has taught playwriting for 40 years gets used to looking for problems and telling their students how to fix them. And the students have to listen to them. So off we went to the races with the professors being professorial, recommending changes that ranged from throwing out 80% of the play to throwing out 120% of the play and starting over. My favorite suggestion from this group was that the play shouldn’t have 11 characters and take place in and around the main street of the town of Postville, it should have 2 characters and all take place in the living room of one of the Hasidic Jews. In Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Thanks a lot. Very helpful.

The third group was made up of normal theater-goers, a few of whom said nice things about the play, but most of whom sat in shocked silence while the activists eviscerated me and the playwriting professors eviscerated my play.

Later, the people from StageWest and several of the readers told me that they couldn’t believe with how much aplomb I had sat and absorbed the abuse. One of them said to me, “But I guess you’ve been to this sort of rodeo before.” Amen to that, sister. It takes a thick skin to be a playwright!

By the way, the feedback from the cast and the artistic management of StageWest is that “Postville” is a good play, which may need some tweaking but certainly doesn’t need to be gutted before moving on to production. (Thank you to Ron, Ron, Todd, and the cast for your hard work. You did a great job.)

The next day I drove to Postville and met with several people, including the rabbi of the town’s Hasidic community and the man who had been the mayor during and after the raids. Overall, I felt I got a mandate to go ahead with the play basically as is, and to leave it referring to Postville. Several of the people I talked to said that it may even do the town some good. And the ex-mayor suggested that I submit “Postville” to nearby Luther College to see if they would be interested in producing it.

The next step is a reading of “Postville” at the Theater Company of Lafayette (Colorado) in September, and a production at their Mary Miller Theater next February.

Take that, bleeding heart activists! And for everyone who told me what I HAVE TO DO to rewrite most or all of the script, write your own damn play.

Yesterday morning I flew from Denver to Austin for 4 days of topping up my grandfatherly batteries. When I got to the baggage claim area in Austin, I went over to monitors to see which carousel my bag would be coming in on. The second listing on the screen was an arrival for flight 1147 from Austin!

That’s right, Flight 1147 (the name of the airline is being withheld to avoid a lawsuit) was going from Austin to Austin. (As my old Haverford College classmate Dave Barry says, “I’m not making this up.”)

At first I thought it had to be a mistake. But then it hit me. No, it wasn’t a mistake. It was just another creative attempt by a struggling airline to BEAT THE RECESSION.

I would love to have been a Japanese tourist taking photos (nobody pays any attention to a Japanese tourist taking photos) at the meeting where they came up with that idea.

“Come on, guys, there must be something else we can do to avoid losing our jobs.”

“Maybe we should schedule more flights.”

“Don’t be silly. There aren’t enough people on the flights we run now, so we lose money on every one. The more we schedule, the more we lose.”

“How about if we get more people to fly?”

“We tried that last week. It didn’t work. ”

“OK, then, let’s run fewer flights.”

“That’s not going to work either. Then we don’t cover our overhead.”

“You mean like the building? Maybe we can get a smaller building”

“I mean like your salary. Maybe we should get you a smaller salary. The problem is that our costs are too high.”

“I know, let’s cut back on services.”

There’s a stunned silence in the room.

“Wait! I’ve got it! Let’s schedule flights from airports to the same airports.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious. Think about about. What’s our biggest expense? Fuel. How much fuel is it going to take to taxi out onto the runway, sit for 20 minutes, and then come back to the terminal?”

“Maybe you’ve got something there.

“That’d be bound to increase our on-time arrival percentage too.”

“It might. If — and this is a big if — we could manage to get the planes back to the terminals on time.”

“And we wouldn’t need nearly as many staff checking people in and handling their bags. Who’s going to bring a suitcase if they’re going to be home in an hour anyway?”

“Practically no one.”

“We could save a lot of money on the planes, too. I mean the planes wouldn’t even need engines would they? Just one of those little tractors to pull them away from the gate.”

“We’ve got plenty of those already.”

“And no toilets! The doors would have to be there, of course, but there wouldn’t need to be anything behind them. We’d just keep the seat-belt sign on for the whole time.”

By now the ideas would be flying (unlike the planes) fast and furious. Skip ahead a year — a venture this complex is going to take lots of planning, isn’t it? — and voila, we have a flight from Austin to Austin.

By the way, the arrival listing on the computer monitor in Baggage Claim showed that Flight 1147 was scheduled to arrive 90 minutes late.

Now I’m sitting here absolutely certain that my former colleagues at Rising Stage have already convened a meeting and (having finally stopped holding hands and humming and opened their eyes — and in the few minutes they can spare not talking about what a big, cruel world it is and how much they’re going to do to save it, very little of which they actually do) are talking about how I intentionally falsified the truth in my mania for self-aggrandizement and what an asshole I am!

I’m bracing for a scathing email to come winging over the wires any minute. I’ll reply and explain what happened, but it won’t do any good. Once you reject the true touchy-feeliness, you will be consummately evil. In fact, you will always have been consummately evil, no matter how long before the breakup you had a cordial relationship.

Am I being paranoid? Of course. But it’s not like it’s not justified. And it’s not like it’s something I can stop. When will I ever stop agonizing about the fact that not everyone is going to love me? Probably never.

I’m resolved to the fact that there will always be an ample supply of people who are angry at me. Because the one thing I will never do is to stop sticking my turtle-head out of its shell and making progress. And seeing my little turtle backside in front of them is one thing that a lot of turtles in the world just can’t stand.